How to scale blockchain tech to the enterprise

Though enterprise adoption will be slow, the blockchain could fundamentally change almost every aspect of the enterprise, says Po.et CEO Jarrod Dicker.

How to scale blockchain tech to the enterpriseThough enterprise adoption will be slow the blockchain could fundamentally change almost every aspect of the enterprise, says po.et CEO Jarrod Dicker.

Po.et CEO Jarrod Dicker spoke to TechRepublic about the enterprise adoption of blockchain and how it could possibly change almost every aspect of the enterprise. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Dan Patterson: How do you scale what you're doing to the enterprise?"

Jarrod Dicker: Great question. So that is a huge, I don't want to say challenge, but a huge focus of discussion in the blockchain space at large. You want to stay true to decentralization, open up opportunity to reach people all over the world, through transactional elements like Bitcoin, and like Ethereum, where you can use technologies like MetaMask to pay or other wallets out there, verse going enterprise which means high velocity volume and scale which is not synonymous with how these transactions, per second, work on the blockchain.

What you'll see is that many of these companies that are blockchain companies, are frankly not blockchain companies, or they use some elements of blockchain; maybe they use a certain currency, or maybe they use data storage on the blockchain, but they use hosting not IPFS but AWS or elsewhere.

It's a challenge. I don't think there's a right or wrong way; I don't think that there is any negative in a blockchain solution that brings serious value, because of what a certain blockchain, or a certain iteration of it does, while also leveraging some things that are centralized. But philosophically, you run into some issues, because a lot of people in this space understand that scale problem, but are so focused on why many of us are in this in the first place, which is decentralization and the value it can bring. Decentralization is extremely valuable, when it meant being able to exchange money without central banks, or when it comes to identity, being able to remove trust from a single source to basically pinpoint identity. What we're doing with reputation, same thing. How do you build a consensus around those things?

If you're looking to be— and this is why I laugh a lot about the blockchain of ad tech type things— where you're talking about millions of transactions per second and then you're doing it to the blockchain; how can that honestly work? And slowly, they're figuring it out. Now there's things like Lightening Network and others that are building the opportunity to be able to move faster, and scale, but by no means can you build these enterprise end-to-end products on the blockchain that could be used by, let's say a CNET today, to replace Salesforce, or something of that nature, a lot of it's philosophical; what I'm seeing is people want to stick to the true value of decentralization, because if you move too far away, it's a dangerous game, because then all of a sudden, you're just building what's already been built and you're just kind of recycling old ideas.

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